


Disclosure

by Runespoor



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Multi, bring your own subtext
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-05-04 14:51:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5338154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runespoor/pseuds/Runespoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Did you try to clone her too?"</p>
<p>Cass confronts Tim with a question that's more like a demand. Emotional honesty ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disclosure

**Author's Note:**

> Time period: One Year Later-ish, assumes Cass got out of Deathstroke's clutches earlier than canon actually let her, i.e. she's not a villain.
> 
> Meant as something of a fix-it, at least as an examination of the narrative choices.

Tim doesn’t see or hear anything before he’s shoved against the wall, the air cut out of his lungs; the attack’s over before he even started fighting back.

“ _Did you try to clone her too_?”

That’s— Cass’ voice, distorted and chopped with anger, but at least it’s not an enemy. Tim relaxes, lets his fingers uncurl from where he was reaching for his collapsible bo staff.

Cass can read his answer off of him, past the words he's stringing together. When they were younger he found it off-putting, even scary. Today it feels like a comfort, and that’s as strange as Cass seeking out his presence: they haven’t exactly kept in touch. 

“ _Why-- didn’t you_?”

She hisses like Batman. Tim’s modelled his scary persona after Batman too, they all have, but he’s not—he’s never going to be as at ease in his body as Cass or Dick. He knows how Bruce's mind works, but his heatr, or soul, or the thing that makes him Batman, the faith in Justice as an absolute – Cass is the closest to that. 

It’s not exactly a question you’d get from Batman, though.

Her hold on him loosens, and she steps back. She’s not wearing her costume, but with her Tim’s never sure it makes much of a difference. Then again he’s been thinking along those lines about himself for a while, too. Maybe it’s just his analytical skills that went to hell, instead of his ability to compartmentalize.

“It would have failed,” he says.

“You tried for _Superboy_.” 

In her mouth the name sounds like a curse. Tim recalls vaguely Kon once telling him about Batgirl showing up in Kansas and Frenching him; it’d been a bit of a weird story, Kon had called it An Experience and lost himself in denials when Tim inquired whether he meant that in a religious or carnal sense, most of them to the tune of “don’t get me wrong dude your sister is _way hot_ but she scared the bejeezus outta me”. And Kon – Kon had met Steph too. As Spoiler of course, but also more recently. When he came over and looked for Robin. 

It’s unfair that the last time Robin saw Superboy, Robin wasn’t Tim. (Kon had hated her. Hated seeing her in—for Kon, it was Tim’s costume. Tim knows because afterwards they’d both complained to him, Robin – Steph – in person and Kon through the one chat conversation Tim had agreed to before losing himself in his new normal, ordinary, civilian life.)

He leans against the wall, resting his head. His eyes fall shut; hard enough to speak of it. He doesn’t want to see her, her reactions, her judgment. If he’s honest with himself (and at this stage why not? It might make for an interesting change) he’s always been afraid of her judgment. Like Batman’s. He knows of her compassion, for children and crooks who want to change alike, but to him she’s always seemed unforgiving. 

Maybe because he's never been very good at seeing why he should be forgiven his mistakes.

He picks his words with the care he can’t afford to waste on body language. 

“He was my best friend. Like she was for you.” The sharp intake of breath is the most he ever got out of Cass in an unhandicapped spar. “Besides, he was a clone. I knew—I mean, at least at knew for him it’d been done. That’s how he’d come to exist. At least I had reasons to think it could be done, I could—I could make a copy. Of him.”

It’s not the first time he’s thought this through, far from it; when you’re that far gone and aware of it, you spend a lot of effort on self-justification. He’s never said it aloud, though, always shied away from it. Out of paranoia, he thought; who knew who could be listening, right? 

Here and now, it just sounds crazy – not “as a fox,” just Gotham-insane, driven to madness by grief. Crazy, and horrible. How Conner would’ve hated that Tim – his own best friend – was now reducing him to his mere nature as a clone.

“And?”

Tim’s eyes fly open. Cass’ voice is as rough as her touch on his shoulder is soft, and he looks down, away from the terrible sorrow in her eyes, and there, her hand is resting on his shoulder. Away from his pressure points.

He swallows past the thick knot in his throat. 

“And I—I couldn’t, with her. I couldn’t make a copy. Not Steph. She’s n—I mean she _wasn’t_ ,” his voice is breaking and Cass’ face is scrunching up more and more, “she wasn’t the sort of person you could, oh, you know.”

And it’s vague and weak and at any other time he’d feel ashamed for not finding the words, but they all escape him now, even the maudlin ones he never dares say aloud.

Cass nods, like she understands. “She made herself.”

She does understand. Steph mattered to her as much as she mattered to Tim. They didn’t start out too friendly, Tim remembers, Batgirl creeped Steph out and Spoiler wasn’t anywhere near Batgirl’s league, but. When he was thirteen Tim didn’t much like Spoiler himself. Steph wore that down, too. She did that.

“Yeah. Spoiler was her idea.”

He’s surprised to find he’s smiling. Cass watches him, and returns a smile – her nose wrinkled like on the verge of a guffaw, and lopsided to the side, like when she was younger she got in a fistfight and she cut her lip on her teeth. Steph’s smile, through and through, on Cass’ face.

He sucks in a breath. A more lucid part of himself points he should have expected something like that. It’s not like Cass can reread Steph’s emails to keep her in her mind. (Tim does, sometimes. They’re short, most of them. They did all their most important communication face to face, shoved in that meagre, honest handful of months after Bruce gave Steph Tim's secret ID. Sometimes he imagines breaking into her mother’s house and stealing the diary he knows Steph used to keep, just to hear her again, hyperbolic similes and all.)

“When I fought Shiva, after I left,” Cass says, and it’s all Tim can do not to startle; she never told him what she did after she left Blüdhaven. He pieced some of it together, but he had no idea of the particulars, and especially not that she’d faced down Lady Shiva again. “There was a Lazarus Pit.” She pauses. “I thought of Steph.”

Her skinny frame shrieks with tension. It’s not something he’s used to. 

Just now, she—rested her hand on his shoulder when he needed it. Would she welcome the same? 

Tentatively, he raises his hand, and unbidden, flashes back to that time in Blüdhaven, with Dick gone and Steph dead. When he and Cass were holding the city together and falling apart. They’d taken care of each other’s wounds, then. Maybe they should’ve tried to do the same for their grief.

“I couldn’t do it, either,” she says, low.

Slowly, he pats her shoulder. She lets him.

“I didn't want to.”

Later he's not sure who said it aloud first, and who turned awkward patting into a hug where they could cry, clinging to each other like two lost children.


End file.
